Dozens in Congress support President Trump’s view of birthright citizenship
Several dozen members of the Republican Party from the House and Senate have submitted a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court arguing in support of President Donald Trump’s view of birthright citizenship.
That, from the 14th Amendment, declares that those born in the United States and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens.
The fight is over the precedent that has been in power for decades now, that anyone born in the United States, with no regard to being subject to the jurisdiction, has been granted citizenship, creating a massive birth tourism industry in which foreigners enter the U.S. illegally, give birth, then are protected by their citizen children acting as anchors for them. Entire clans end up getting financial subsidies from U.S. taxpayers under the scheme.
Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, were joined by more than two dozen others to brief the Supreme Court on the facts of the dispute.
Trump issued an executive order when he took office clarifying that citizenship was not simply handed out to anyone born in the U.S., and activist groups promptly sued.
The members of Congress explained, “There is widespread agreement that the Jurisdiction Clause means that children born in the United States to ambassadors or invading soldiers would not receive citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. The best reason is because they do not owe total allegiance to the United States, rather than (as Plaintiffs contend) because those groups allegedly have immunity from federal law (in fact, they do not have unconditional immunity, as explained below).
“There is a wealth of support for the proposition that the Clause applies the same to children of those illegally present in the country because they (like ambassadors and foreign soldiers) do not owe total allegiance to the United States; they remain citizens of their home countries, to whom they owe at least divided allegiance and which often imposes birthright citizenship of its own on the children born to its nationals in the United States. Allegiance is also a reciprocal relationship. The person must be present with the consent of the sovereign, a factor on which this Court extensively relied upon in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898). But illegal aliens and their children are present in the United States without consent, i.e., only by defying its laws.”
They note that English case law supports the concept of “total allegiance and its role in citizenship,” and “even the Senators who drafted and debated the Jurisdiction Clause stated that children of ‘aliens’ or others ‘owing allegiance to anybody else’ would not receive citizenship.”
They point out that understanding lasted for decades, and Congress never has granted citizenship to the children of those illegally in the U.S., so “the other branches cannot confer such citizenship on their own.”
Trump’s order, therefore, is correct, they explain.
WorldNetDaily earlier reported when the White House dropped a bombshell on the case: documentation that experts and scholars wrote at the time the 14th Amendment was adopted that it did not extend citizenship to everyone, especially those in the country illegally.
A report at Revolver.news quotes from a filing from the White House in support of Trump’s order.
The government’s birthright brief has been filed. The most impressive part, which I hadn’t fully appreciated since my focus has been the common law, is the sheer number of commentators who presumed for decades that temporary visitors didn’t qualify for birthright citizenship: pic.twitter.com/AtjsRrr4MJ
— Ilan Wurman (@ilan_wurman) January 21, 2026
It quotes expert after expert after expert – all contemporaneous to the time the amendment was being considered, then adopted, and all of them offer explanations that those children of foreigners, of temporary residents or transient travelers passing through, are not U.S. citizens.
For example, Francis Wharton, in “A Treatise on the Conflict of Laws” from 1881, said, “Chinese born of Chinese non-naturalized parents, such parents not being here domiciled, are not citizens.”
Alexander Porter More, in the 1881 “A Treatise on Citizenship, said, “The words ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ exclude the children of foreigners transiently within the United States.”
Literally dozens of additional experts expressed like opinions.